


Jump

by ChasingVulpixels



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Eventual Fluff, F/F, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-05-14 04:24:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5729413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChasingVulpixels/pseuds/ChasingVulpixels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chloe had always been told that troubles came in threes. She liked to think she was the exception to that rule- in her case, they seemed to come by the hundred, all at once.</p><p>Soulmate AU. Loosely based on the song 'Jump' by Lizzy Grant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. TV in Black and White

Chloe had always been told that troubles came in threes. She liked to think she was the exception to that rule- in her case, they seemed to come in hundreds and hundreds, all at once. She clutched her coffee cup like it was the answer to all of her problems. The blue glow of her digital clock cast a soft but eerily cold light across the room, illuminating the high points of her face- her cheekbones, the bridge of her nose, the curve of her lips, while it deepened the shadows, until her face was almost unrecognisable, ethereal. There was a sense of unease as the minutes crept forward, the quiet hum of the occasional car the only indication of the passage of time outside of Chloe’s room.  

She was perched on the edge of her bed, not really sitting, but not standing either. Between her fingers hung a cigarette. As her hand trembled, tiny pieces of ash flaked off of the end, settling amongst the two-weeks-in-the-making layer of dust that covered almost all of her possessions like a blanket. Small ripples began to appear in her rapidly cooling cup of coffee, and though she fought to steady her hand, the shaking would not cease. Chloe set the cup down. Not moving her eyes from the clock on her dresser, she took a drag, the end of her cigarette glowing orange as she inhaled before fading back to an ashy grey. The smoke began to spiral above her, before seeping up through the ceiling or into the cracks in her walls, or simply getting sucked out of the slightly open window by the slight draft. She wasn’t really sure where her smoke went after it had escaped her lungs- it always seemed to disappear. In that moment, Chloe found herself wishing that she was smoke herself, so that she could just dissipate, evaporate, vanish into thin air and mingle with the billions of other particles surrounding her. In some ways though, similarities could be drawn. _For_ _example_ , she thought, _I_ _am_ _both_ _suffocating_ _and_ _deadly_.

Her gaze flickered between her clock and the spot on her forearm at an almost constant rate, unsure if it was burning because she was thinking too much about it, or if it was burning because it was happening already. Either way, it didn’t really matter much to her. It was inevitable, and it was absolutely terrifying. As she teetered on the brink of eighteen, the border between kid and adult, she chewed her lip until her mouth was filled with the metallic tang of blood, and although she could feel her fingernails digging into her palm, she made no effort to move her hands. The pain was bearable, and a welcome distraction from the ever-present ticking of time.

She and Max had always talked about this moment as children. She remembered many late night conversations in haphazardly built pillow forts about exactly who their soulmate might be. She often listened to Max ramble about her Prince Charming, her perfect man who would sweep her off of her feet the second she turned eighteen, the second his wonderful name appeared in beautifully neat cursive on the spot just below the crease of her elbow.

Chloe sometimes tried to join in. She was a good liar- Max could never tell that her heart wasn’t in her descriptions of this mystery man, that she didn’t really feel like having a Prince Charming of her own anytime soon- but mostly, she just liked to listen. There was something about the way that her best friend told stories that made them so captivating, and the usually outspoken Chloe Price often found herself unable to do anything except sit in wonder as Max painted worlds around her.

The only time Chloe ever felt a little out of place with Max was when she talked about love in general. Sometimes she wondered if there was something wrong with her, hidden somewhere deep in her genetic coding for doctors to discover years later and cry out in horror. _‘Oh_ _no!’_ They would exclaim, _‘She’s_ _destined_ _to_ _be_ _alone_ _forever!’_ . Try as she might, she could never put a face to the ‘man of her dreams’, and although she wished it harder than anything, she never heard his voice in her thoughts like some claimed to have. Not that this bothered her much-honestly, the thought of having a stranger in her head was almost worse than the thought of having no voice (and subsequently, no soulmate) at all. The only voice that wasn’t her own she ever heard was Max’s, and she suspected it was because Max was 90% of her impulse control and the only reason her dead cat’s name wasn’t tattooed on her ankle.

Although she knew now that these fears of isolation were childish, they still remained implanted somewhere deep in her subconscious, lodged there like a rock at the bottom of a lake. Occasionally, something would happen, the rock would shift, and a bubble of air would escape, rising to the surface- but this only occurred on what Chloe referred to as the ‘bad nights’. The nights she spent awake, and empty except for the smoke in her lungs and the ache in her heart.

Normally, receiving a soulmate mark wasn’t that big of a deal. Sure, it was important, but some people never even found their soulmates. Some have more than one. And she was sure someone out there had no-one at all. For Chloe, though, it was one of the most tense, awful moments of her life. The thought had occurred to her before, but she had always pushed it away, locked it in a drawer in the back of her mind somewhere to be examined later. Now though, she would have to wear it on her sleeve, like some awful talisman to remind everyone that _hey_ , _I’m_ _different_. The thought made her sick to the stomach.  
  
 There were precisely three minutes left now. She watched in nervous anticipation as the clock continued to tick over, picking at her already chipped blue nail polish. The time seemed to crawl by. A moment ago, all she had wanted was to live in the moment of agonising wait forever, preferring to stay in uncertainty for the rest of her life than face whatever the terrible truth might be. Of course, the time flew by. Now, when all she wished for was for this ordeal to be over, for the seconds to go by so quickly that she couldn’t process what was happening, time decided it drag its heels and make her wait. What felt like an eternity was really only thirty-six seconds. She knew, because she counted each one as it slipped away.  

The intrusive buzzing of her phone vibrating on her desk was enough to snap Chloe out of whatever counting-related stupor she was in, the buzz both startling her and knocking some crumpled papers off of the edge of her desk. On a normal day, she would have left them there to rot amongst the other junk that had met the same fate- but now she jumped at the opportunity to take action, to tear her gaze away from her arm because surely something should be happening by now. _Right?_  She stood up quickly, ignoring the tingling feeling of blood rushing back to her legs as she crossed to the fallen paper scattered across the floor. Crouching, she slowly gathered each piece of paper with care, collecting and sorting the miscellaneous rubbish that had somehow ended up on her desk. It had become a graveyard of late essays and various letters from school predating her expulsion, unopened, unread, and all covered in a thin layer of dust, ash, and cookie crumbs.

Upon reaching the last page of what she had thought was Romeo and Juliet: It’s Not a Tragedy, however, she was slightly taken aback to find that it was, in fact, an old photo. She smiled at the memory, fondly turning the picture over to look at the fading pencil on the back. She was met with Max’s handwriting. Her heart twisted with pain she had gotten so good at repressing, and she almost ripped the picture in two. Her mouth filling with the bitter but familiar taste of loss, she shoved it back into the junk paper pile hastily. The image, however, remained fixed in her mind.  
  
_“Don’t fall!” Max shouted, looking up at Chloe from the playground floor with wide, wonder-filled eyes. Her hands were cupped around her mouth in an attempt to make her voice louder, just in case her best friend didn’t hear her warning from two metres away. Chloe grinned back down at her, despite having lost her last baby tooth only moments before trying to do a tre-flip on her skateboard. The result was a gap-filled although still decidedly cheery smile. Jo had run over when she saw her best friend fly off the board, almost dropping her new camera in the process, just to check if she was alright. She had met Max’s frenzied gaze with a triumphant, albeit slightly bloody grin and a thumbs up as if to say ‘nailed it’. Jo was frightened at first by the sheer amount of blood pouring from Chloe’s now toothless gap, but it turned out that there was a lot more than was expected for such a small wound. ‘All the best pirates have battle scars.’ Chloe reminded her, when she looked as if she was about to cry, and neither of the girls thought it was strange that Chloe that was doing the comforting, rather than it being the other way around. After a little cleanup and a few sniffles from her friend, she was raring to go again, climbing to the very top of the monkey bars with ease. Max looked on, her brown bob cut even more messy than usual from all of her anxious hair tugging and twisting as she watched Chloe with a strange sort of nervous excitement. When Chloe reached the top, Max had cheered and snapped a picture with her polaroid camera, and they sat and watched it develop in the late afternoon sunlight. Even though the shot was terrible, she had insisted on keeping it._

  She abruptly stopped her train of thought there, not willing to follow it any further. That was the eve of her fourteenth birthday. The last day she could say she was really happy. Of course, it sounds dramatic, but Chloe Price was dramatic in nature. To her, it was all or nothing, go big or go home. Unfortunately, it was much the same with her emotions, and she often felt herself feeling five years’ worth of grief in one, awful wave, or simply nothing at all. She could never decide which one was worse.

Chloe often blamed her dad for the way her life had turned out. When that made her feel too guilty, she liked to blame Max. She would sometimes push the blame onto her mother, who seemed perfectly okay ignoring the rapidly fading soulmate mark on her own arm, for letting herself forget what her dad’s scrawly, all-capital handwriting looked like. For settling for David, her stepfather-slash-prison guard.

Trying so hard to control her, he ended up completely eradicating what little obedience she had left in her, and with each new rule came a new opportunity to break one. With Max unable to keep her on the straight-and-narrow, she found herself spiralling out of even her own control. It was around age fifteen that she dyed her hair blue. The first time, she did it so badly that she wore a little black beanie to cover it for an entire month. After that, the blue stayed, and so did the hat. To her, it just meant that she never had to worry about roots. To David, she was rapidly becoming a menace to society.

Sometimes, Chloe thought about what might’ve happened, had her mother just walked home that day. Had Max’s parents not dragged her halfway across the country and away from Chloe right when she needed her best friend most. Had Max actually attempted to contact her in the five years they spent apart. But none of those things happened, and here she was. She knew that what-if’s led down a dangerous path, and didn’t like to dwell on it.

  Chloe was brought crashing back to reality by a sharp stinging on her arm. Her heart felt as though it might leap out of her chest, like a trapped bird fluttering against her ribcage in a frenzied attempt to escape. She could feel words spelling themselves out on her arm, but she became completely immobile, unable to bring herself to look. She glanced everywhere but her burning soulmate mark, studying the mess that was her room, allowing her eyes to linger on the empty bottles of beer lurking in the corners, or trail over the scrawled sharpie graffiti on the walls, or forcing herself to focus the way that her fairy lights flickered on and off periodically. There were only so many things in her room that she could look at, and after staring intently at her red china ashtray for long enough that she could map out the cracks on the back of her hand, she mustered the courage to look down. She took a deep breath, steeling herself for the worst, for the blank space that was sure to greet her. She looked down. And in an instant, she found herself wishing that there was no name there at all.

   _‘Maxine_ _Caulfield_ ’ read her arm.

There was no mistaking that handwriting.


	2. Do You Wanna Jump?

She waited until Max’s own eighteenth birthday before she got her first tattoo. Chloe spent at least 6 hours sat vigilantly by the phone that day. And, although she wouldn’t admit it, she was hoping for a call. She’d imagined this day a thousand times so she already knew what she would say when the moment came. In her head, it went something like this: 

 **[Phone** **rings]**  
**Chloe:**  Oh, hello Max. Gosh it’s been a long time! I wonder what ever you could be calling me for?   
**Max:** Well, you see, Chloe Price, it’s my eighteenth birthday, in case you’d forgotten (which if you had I would understand completely, considering the way I completely abandoned you in such a time of need) and I am calling to let you know that we must be soulmates because I have your name tattooed on my arm.  
  **Chloe** , **incredulously:** Me? Oh what a surprise. I never would have guessed.    
**Max:** Yes, you, I am so lucky to have such a wonderful person as my faithful companion forever. I am on my way now, I am driving from Seattle as we speak, along with some takeout and a small bundle of cash.  
  **Chloe:** Although I am mad about your abandonment I am accepting of your apology and therefore with some small favours (hella cash) I feel I will be able to put it behind me. Excitedly anticipating your arrival.  
 [ **end** **scene]**     
  
But after the day turned to night, and the sun slid down the sky and behind the rooftops of the suburbs, Chloe gave up. After a year and a half of waiting for Max, of waiting for the one thing that would surely happen because there was no way that the universe could be so _cruel_ to one person- there was nothing. Not a call, a text, a letter, even. To her surprise, she didn’t cry, or scream or punch her wall with already bloodied knuckles. She was back to feeling nothing, and this time, Chloe was certain that it was better than the alternative. She lay awake all night, debating, but by the time the sun had crept it’s way back up to it’s usual perch in the cloudless mid-October sky, Chloe’s mind was made up, and her resolve was unshakeable. Sort of.

  “Are you sure about this?” The tattoo artist asked as she sat in the uncomfortable leather chair. His expression was laced with concern, and the way he frowned made is eyebrow piercing sit oddly on his face. Chloe, however, was more focused on how her thighs were sticking to the seat, and she found herself wishing she’d thought through her clothing choices a little more thoroughly that morning before noticing she’d been asked a question. She realised, probably a little too late, that no, she was absolutely not sure, but she nodded anyway and grit her teeth. She tried not to flinch as the tiny needle pierced her skin, but it felt like the tattoo was being seared onto her flesh with some kind of dark fire magic from the fantasy movies she secretly loved. She hadn’t expected it to hurt this much, but having Max’s name etched onto her skin as a constant and permanent reminder of her the extent of her solitude was far more painful. Chloe had never been one for thinking things through, she was more of a do-now-regret-later girl, so it wasn’t until she was halfway out of the door that she realised the weight of her choices. Unable to go back, she frowned down at her arm, almost missing Max’s sloppy cursive just below her elbow. At least now, she had a ‘sweet sleeve’, as she had planned initially. The guilt was almost as bad as the abandonment.

  What was worse than the abandonment, the guilt, and the regret all mixed together and baked in a wonderfully depressing cake was her mother’s fury. That was the icing. And all eighteen candles.  
 “Chloe Elizabeth Price, what on God’s good earth were you thinkin’!” She shouted.

Maybe Chloe was being melodramatic, but she swore she could feel some tremors under her feet as her mother roared at her. She simply turned her head, staring completely away from her mother and trying her hardest not to start an all out screaming match in the middle of their kitchen. Her grip tightened around her car keys in her right hand, the sharp pain of the metal enough to keep her own emotions in check as she took each word on the chin. They were sharp, and cut deep, but Chloe had thick enough skin.

It wasn’t until her mother had said something that was considered taboo in their household that she lost control. She felt the keys slip from her fingers and gently thump onto the floor next to her scuffed black boots, barely registering the pain and the slow trickle of blood from her palm as her Joyce spoke.   
  
She knew it was more than frowned upon to cover up your soulmate mark. It was almost criminal. But Chloe thought she could deal with the backlash, deal with the anger and the strange looks and the frowns and the way that mothers anxiously tugged their children away because "Lucy, it's rude to stare". She thought she could deal with it, because she was already an outcast in any and every other way- she was a dropout, she had no job, no life, no purpose, just taking up space and getting high- but her mother's words hurt her more than she'd thought was even possible. Chloe wished she was feeling nothing again, because it was a  _low_ blow.

“Your father would be so disappointed in you, Chloe.”

Her southern accent was strong, as it always was when she got angry. It had been the same ever since Chloe was small, that a little bit of mischief would bring out her inner Tennessee. This time, however, it was different. Her voice had lost it's fire, it's rage and anger and everything that made it easy to deal with. Instead, it was flat, and empty, and Chloe imagined that if someone were to trip over and drop every single one of their aspirations and dreams onto the floor, they would sound exactly like her mother did.  
  
She wasn’t sure whether she should scream or cry, so she did neither. She simply turned on her heel, letting the blood from her hand drip freely onto the beige carpet, and walked up the stairs.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry that this is a short chapter- I have already written this and it was difficult to find a good place to cut this off. Thanks for your comments, they were very nice and I loved them <3  
> This was proofed by my friend but if you find any typos like last time, feel free to let me know andI'll fix it.  
> -Vulpixels ^__^
> 
> Sorry about the double notes i have NO idea what I'm doing. I'll figure it out eventually lol sorry bye


	3. Kinda Outta Luck

Chloe remained cold and distant and completely emotionless as days passed. She found herself ghosting through the weeks, going through the motions of life but not really living at all. She ate, drank, smoked and slept. That was it.

  She didn’t like to wish her life away- to spend her life counting down from twenty-four every sixty, and then just one more sixty and she would get to do it all over again- but she couldn’t help it. She took to wearing a watch, just so she could hear the seconds ticking over and remind herself that it was almost time for another do-over. Within a week, the watch got lost, the ticking ceased, but her counting did not.  

She spent a lot of time at the junkyard, or in the Blackwell parking lot, scribbling everywhere with her new best friend, her black sharpie. Maybe it wasn’t the best method, but it helped her a little. She had an abundance of hatred and she often found it spilling out of her and all over the people she loved. Chloe much preferred that Blackwell dealt with the backlash and the sharpie ink- not her mom.

It was a Monday afternoon when Chloe Price decided to venture past the boundaries of the parking lot and into the school building- and this was how she had found herself in the Blackwell bathrooms, scrawling some purposely misspelled profanity in pointed, angry capitals. She didn’t feel guilty at all. She was simply adding to the already large number of scribbles and doodles (including but not limited to: a hotdog with legs, a fat Pikachu and _‘fuq_ _rachel_ _amber’_ which was scratched into the tile itself). Besides, to Chloe, Blackwell was only getting what it deserved.

She was halfway through drawing a small alien when the door swung open behind her. She didn’t react, except from putting the lid on her pen and subtly tucking it into her pocket, trying not to look suspicious as she grabbed some paper towels for her already dry hands. From behind, she appeared to be a good-for-nothing delinquent, as described by her stepfather- who she was hoping wasn’t currently standing behind her, wondering how and why she was here. Over the past few years, she had learned that David had an awful habit of turning up exactly where she didn’t want to find him. Thankfully, upon tuning around, she was met with a small, meek-looking brunette who was staring at the floor, and felt the tension in her shoulders ease slightly.  _It could have been worse._

Still, she didn’t want to risk getting caught after her expulsion anyway, so she took it as a sign from above to get the hell out, and started towards the exit. It was only when she brushed past the girl roughly, their fingers briefly making contact as she hurried out of there, that her soulmate mark started to burn.

Chloe stopped dead in her tracks.

Their eyes met halfway to an apology, and in the moment of recognition, the girl paled. It was Max Caulfield, there and alive and looking so scared that she could have seen a ghost, for all Chloe knew. She imagined, momentarily, what it would have been like if she was a ghost, if had she died before any of this happened. Would Max have known? Would she have gone to her funeral, and jumped into the grave as they lowered the coffin, and sobbed loudly on her tombstone as she laid flowers? Her mind was suddenly filled with the image of another funeral, in another universe, where it was dark and rainy and nobody was there to cry about her except from her poor mother. She pushed the thought out of her mind.

  It all happened so fast that Chloe didn’t remember consciously thinking about it, but when Max turned to high-tail it out of there, she grabbed her wrist, much to both Max’s and her own surprise. She had forgotten how small she was, how easily breakable, and she instantly regretted her use of force as she held her tiny wrist tightly. When their skin made contact, Chloe was suddenly acutely aware of the burning on her forearm. It was deadened slightly by the ink that smothered the writing, but it continued to grow hotter and hotter until she almost let go entirely- but she didn’t. Chloe clutched onto her arm like a lifeline, because she couldn’t lose her a second time. Max looked so scared, blue eyes wide and doe-like and filled to the brim with fear.

Chloe didn’t even think about manners then, all of the politeness and etiquette her mother had tried so hard to drum into her as a child going out of the window in seconds as she yanked up the girl’s sleeve and desperately tried to catch a glimpse of Prince Charming’s name in the beautiful cursive that they had always imagined. She felt Max fruitlessly try to pull away, to break free of her iron grip, but no amount of wriggling could make her let go this time. Max let her arm go limp with defeat, and winced as she felt fingers tracing the words. It was almost as if she was ashamed, she looked everywhere except from Chloe, and she could feel her friend’s unwavering stare heavy on her face, almost burning. Max didn’t stare back, even though she wanted to.  
  
Slowly, Chloe’s grip loosened, and she let her arm fall at her side. The name was unmistakeable. The handwriting so strikingly familiar, so similar to the rapidly drying sharpie ink on the wall behind her.

Chloe Elizabeth Price.

Max was no longer struggling, or desperate to escape now that Chloe had released her. She stood directly in front of her, small in stature but filled with what seemed to be either anger or determination. She grabbed Chloe’s wrist, forcefully pulled up the sleeve of her black jacket, and stared at the spiralling red roses and skulls and beautiful ink working its way up her arm, presumably to her shoulder which was still obscured by her blazer. When she realised that whatever name was there had been covered up, she stepped back. Her eyes were brimming with tears, and Chloe felt her heart break so painfully that it seemed her whole body had ripped in two.  
 “Who was it?” Max said, quietly. Her voice was shaking as she stared furiously at the ground, tears splashing onto the cold tile below her. When Max heard no reply, she dragged her gaze up to Chloe’s face. Her expression was unreadable.  
_“Who was it?”_ She asked again, this time louder, with more fire. Her eyes were burning, meeting Chloe’s icy gaze with the heat of her own unblinking stare.  
  
  “You.” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please help me i still can't fix the notes it's been a week

**Author's Note:**

> 'sup. this is my first pic on this site, so I have no clue what I'm doing. don't worry, I'll pick it up. eventually.
> 
> if you see any weird names in this it's because I originally wrote it for something else and then decided to use that as a base for this fic. I have a few more chapters to come, but it's going to be a fairly short story to begin with, just to test the waters. If you like it, I'll upload more here.
> 
> P.S if you followed me here from ff.net, the content will be different. I want to have different stories on each account instead of posting them on both sites because that annoys me as a reader of stories that do that.  
> -Vulpixels ;)


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